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3:25 am EST 55°F (13°C) in Umatilla, FL
Calendar of Updates Speaking of football, I'm very pleasantly surprised with the way the University of Michigan's football season has gone. Given all the offensive players lost to graduation after last season, I thought Michigan would be lucky to finish 7-4 and go to a minor bowl game, but here we are two days before the Ohio State game and they're 9-1, almost guaranteed to go to the Rose Bowl. A victory over the Suckeyes in that black hole called Columbus, or an Iowa victory over Wisconsin in Iowa City, clinches a return trip to Pasadena. As for Saturday's game, I'll say this: if Michigan can stop OSU's running game, keep good run/pass balance offensively, and avoid special-teams blunders, they ought to win easily. I'm still hard at work on my essay aimed at parents of gay/lesbian teenagers. In part, it's been so difficult because I lack the perspective one gains from actually having a child, but in addition to that, I'm also trying to say a lot. It may well push 30KB by the time I get it done. I'm about 95% recovered from some kind of a stomach/intestinal bug I began suffering from a week ago today. Last Thursday's lunch caused me to have to make three restroom stops over the distance of 180 miles; until Tuesday, it was like I couldn't eat anything without a good bit of stomach pain and diarrhea. It was more of an "it hurts" doubling-over kind of pain than a nauseous feeling; I never felt like I was anywhere near puking. Some antacids and anti-diarrhea medications slowly got rid of the problems I was having, and during the day yesterday I felt almost totally fine. I honestly don't know whether this was a minor case of food poisoning, a stomach flu, or something else. Maybe it's all the junk food that the harried life of a truck driver seems to require one to eat. (Just another reason I need to get the hell out of this industry as soon as I can …) Frankly, the trucking industry seems to offer about the best pay of any career open to non-college graduates. As much as I have come to hate some aspects of this line of work, I have to face the fact that I'm at least doubling what I'd make flipping burgers at McDonald's or answering somebody's phones. There are some positive aspects of the job that I like, such as the fact that I don't have a supervisor constantly looking over my shoulder and bitching at me, but this is really not what I want to be doing with my entire working life. I need a car at some point — I'm still trying to work on my father a bit on buying his 1999 Ford Taurus — and then I want to have a decent nest egg before I try to get back into school. I will not repeat the 32-hours-of-work-per-week act that doomed my first attempt at college; at the same time, I had better plan to depend on nobody but myself — in other words, I'd better not be expecting any pleasant financial surprises, and frankly, my past financial woes have screwed my parents out of enough money already. If I have to take student loans to cover tuition, so be it, but I am not going to put myself in a position where I must work 35 hours a week to scrape up enough for rent, food, basic needs, and such — hence the need to put away a good bit of money before re-entering school. I feel that I have to plan for the worst — and then some. It's about time to hit the sack for the night. |